Doesn't server rendering increase load on the server? I like to off-load as much processing to the user's browser as possible. We have ~1 million users and I like to think that when we off-load a lot of processing to the browser, we basically have 1 million servers for free.
Moving from React to htmx
151–160 of 326 posts
Re: Moving from React to htmx
#152I'm just so burnt out with new things. How do I combat such burnout? I really don't care about 'Htmx', I think barely any apps need much beyond what was available in ~2006 in terms of web tech. I just feel tired knowing that moving from React to Htmx is an option. Yet another option which will very possibly bring zero commercial value (although it might be a nicer dev experience I guess) to any project I ever work on…
Unless you need to hire. Then 2006 tech is not viable. 2006 tech in frontend = COBOL level stuff
This is not a correct interpretation. I'd argue the basics - HTML, CSS and Javascript hasn't changed as much since 2006. jQuery came out in 2006 and we were manipulating DOM back then. Now, we have frameworks like React, where we are manipulating DOM. The only differences are new browser APIs and a much better code maintainability.
Re: Moving from React to htmx
#153I'm just so burnt out with new things. How do I combat such burnout? I really don't care about 'Htmx', I think barely any apps need much beyond what was available in ~2006 in terms of web tech. I just feel tired knowing that moving from React to Htmx is an option. Yet another option which will very possibly bring zero commercial value (although it might be a nicer dev experience I guess) to any project I ever work on…
Don't look at it. There's a million new things being invented and ignored every day but for some reason if it touches web dev it 1) gets a thread 2) gets upvoted and 3) you people are near the top of every comment thread. Whatever led to you posting that you don't care about this rather than just not even noticing it like all the new things you see every single day that don't even penetrate your consciousness. Find a…
I really like this comment.
Pointed my attention on how my mind anthromorphizes hacker news comments and perceived it as an amorphous invisible ultra smart conversation partner.
I wish I could have a meat space equivalent for that but given the amount of possible topics it’s hard to imagine a human equivalent.
Re: Moving from React to htmx
#154Doesn't server rendering increase load on the server? I like to off-load as much processing to the user's browser as possible. We have ~1 million users and I like to think that when we off-load a lot of processing to the browser, we basically have 1 million servers for free.
It is quite nice to create on the browser, but as the number and variety of clients increase, the application may become slow for some. And the main problems start there.
Re: Moving from React to htmx
#155Love htmx and this talk is a brilliant run down of where it works well. But as always it’s about choosing the right tool for the job. Server rendered pages/fragments solve so many issues around security and time to develop a product, however it only gets you so far. Ultimately I think the decision when choosing a stack comes down to how much state you need to managed in browser. The vast majority of sites needs very…
What security issues does server rendering solve? I resent that every website needs to be an SPA, but from a security perspective I’ve concluded that the clearer line in the sand that SPA application architectures creates is better than the security challenges that can result from server side rendering. Navigating the risks around the NPM supply chain is another story, but I suspect it will be solved by large / popul…
Here's one I've experienced. Suppose you have a table of customers, and you want to show an extra column of data on that page showing total orders, if and only if the viewer of that table has the manager role.
With an SPA, you'll be building an API (perhaps a 'REST' one, or GraphQL) to expose all the data required, such as customer name, email, etc, as well as the extra 'total orders' field iff they have the manager role. Now you need to make sure that either (a) that endpoint properly excludes that 'total orders' field if they lack the permission, or (b) you have a separate endpoint for fetching those kind of stats and lock that behind the role, or (c) (I hope not) you just fetch all orders then count them up! Now, having properly secured your API so that all and only the right users can get that data, you have extra logic in your front end such as 'if has role manager then show this column too'.
With a server side rendered page, you don't have to do the API security bit. You can just fetch all the data you like (often via a single SQL query), and then replicate the same extra logic of 'if has role manager then show this column too'. You've skipped the whole "make sure the API is secure" step.
Now suppose you want to add a dashboard for every admin user, not just managers, showing total orders system wide. Did you include that in your API already? Now you're likely going to need a new endpoint that allows any such user to fetch total system orders, while managers are still the only ones who can fetch per customer order totals. Having found a place to add that to your API, you can render it. With the server side page, there's no extra work to keep this secure. The dashboard is already restricted to the users who can see it, so just add the extra query to fetch total orders and display it.
In short, there's a whole layer that an SPA needs to secure for which there is no analogue with a server side rendered site. In an SPA you secure the API and then have the logic for what to show to whom. For the server side rendered site, you just have the logic for what to show to whom and that gives you the security for free.
Re: Moving from React to htmx
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
The slippery slope that scares me (as a React developer) about htmx (or Hotwire.dev, in particular is the one I was looking at), is that you start making the assumption that the client's internet is fast. There was demo that showed it normally takes ~100ms to click a mouse, and if you attach to the on-mouse-down, then by the time the mouse has been released (100ms later), you can have already fetched an updated rende…
For a real world example of this, GitHub uses server-side rendered fragments. Working with low latency and fast internet in the office, the experience is excellent. Trying to do the same outside with mobile internet, and even with a 5G connection, the increased latency makes the application frustrating to use. Every click is delayed, even for simple actions like opening menus on comments, filtering files or expanding…
Github does? Maybe that's the reason why I often get the error message: "page took too long to render" after ten seconds of waiting.
example: https://github.com/pannous/hieros/wiki/%F0%93%83%80 this is admittedly a complicated markdown file, however it often fails on much simpler files.
Re: Moving from React to htmx
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh god please let’s not go back to JSF
How was it worse than the current state of affairs of complexity with React? Bowser, npm, typescript, obfuscation, compressors, build pipelines.. it’s a lot. Life at the front-end today is so discombobulated, creating a bunch of backend APIs which will generally only be used and consumed by a single browser front-end. I’m genuinely curious, because I never used JSF except for a single school exercise
Primefaces makes it a bit more tolerable, but JSF is an ancient, slow, buggy beast that's hard to integrate with anything. Managing state on the server for every little thing is not scale-able, even for a measly number of clients. You don't have to grow to be a Facebook to feel the effects of the bad design of JSF.
Re: Moving from React to htmx
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
How was it worse than the current state of affairs of complexity with React? Bowser, npm, typescript, obfuscation, compressors, build pipelines.. it’s a lot. Life at the front-end today is so discombobulated, creating a bunch of backend APIs which will generally only be used and consumed by a single browser front-end. I’m genuinely curious, because I never used JSF except for a single school exercise
I’ve used JSF when it was still beta. It was chosen by an external “architect” as the front end for a big site with millions of views (he was anticipating that JSF would be come popular, and a big project with it would be good on his resume). Salesforce (classic) is JSF. It’s full of bugs and quirks. But it’s kind of nice in certain situations. The big problem here is performance load on both client and server. State…
> Salesforce (classic) is JSF.
Here's a little bit of trivia... The Visualforce framework (that customers can write interactive pages in, and a small minority of the standard UI is build in) is based on JSF, but most of Salesforce classic standard UI is written in a home-grown system that generates HTML described in imperative Java. It's more akin to an HTML generating Tk.
Re: Moving from React to htmx
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
The slippery slope that scares me (as a React developer) about htmx (or Hotwire.dev, in particular is the one I was looking at), is that you start making the assumption that the client's internet is fast. There was demo that showed it normally takes ~100ms to click a mouse, and if you attach to the on-mouse-down, then by the time the mouse has been released (100ms later), you can have already fetched an updated rende…
For a real world example of this, GitHub uses server-side rendered fragments. Working with low latency and fast internet in the office, the experience is excellent. Trying to do the same outside with mobile internet, and even with a 5G connection, the increased latency makes the application frustrating to use. Every click is delayed, even for simple actions like opening menus on comments, filtering files or expanding…
I love HTMX and similar technologies but I think GitHub is a particularly telling example of what can go wrong with these techs. The frontend is so full of consistency bugs that it's appalling: https://youtu.be/860d8usGC0o?t=693
Re: Moving from React to htmx
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sort of. It’s more like when you create an object, you can display the object inline immediately with a JS layer, plus show some status attribute or however deep you like. This explicitly only works with GETters and I can’t imagine how you can show async state with a tool like HTMX easily
What if combined with this? https://htmx.org/examples/lazy-load/
With respect to showing a loader, it’s a solution. Not fully sure I understand the mechanism - is it based on the class or does all content of the div with hx-trigger get replaced? Or even worse is the image still there with opacity 0?
However, this doesn’t solve the optimistic rendering situation at all. In general the approach of HTML over the wire clearly seems barred from solving that, you need a client layer for that